March 30, 2022
A USEFUL DIFFERENTIATION BUT INAPT:
Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist - a political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition (Alexander Motyl, March 30, 2022, The Conversation)Classifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. Aristotle was one of the first to divide systems into those ruled by one, those ruled by a few and those ruled by many.Contemporary scholars usually classify states as being democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian, with each category having a variety of subtypes. Democracies have parliaments, judiciaries, parties, political contestation, civil societies, freedom of speech and assembly, and elections.Authoritarian states rest on the state bureaucracy, military and secret police; they usually circumscribe most of the features of democracies; and they typically are led by juntas, generals or politicians who avoid the limelight.Totalitarian states abolish all the features of democracy, empower their bureaucracies, militaries and secret police to control all of public and private space, promote all-encompassing ideologies and always have a supreme leader.Fascist states share all the features of authoritarianism, and they may also share the features of totalitarianism, but with two key differences. Fascist leaders have genuine charisma - that ephemeral quality that produces popular adulation - and they promote that charisma and the image that goes with it in personality cults. The people genuinely love fascist leaders, and the leaders in turn present themselves as embodiments of the state, the nation, the people.The bare-bones definition of a fascist state is thus this: It is an authoritarian state ruled by a charismatic leader enjoying a personality cult.Seen in this light, Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and the Greece of the colonels were really just your average authoritarian states. In contrast, Mussolini's Italy and Xi Jinping's China are clearly fascist, as were Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR. Fascist states can thus be on the right and on the left.
While we ought to separate out those regimes whose aims are ultimately liberal and just seek to preserve the state from radicalism--Franco and Pinochet--which is why they naturally evolve into liberal democracies with their leaders willingly surrendering power once their work is done, there is another component of the regimes that we are differentiating them from that needs to be mentioned. Leaders like Hitler, Putin and Xi are not heroes of the people but of a specific people, arrayed against the "other" in their own societies, whether they be Jews, Muslims, gypsies, what have you. This is the sense in which Donald and his ilk are "Fascist," as used here.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2022 8:49 AM